This is the second of my Belgian beer articles. In this one I'm focussing on a Trappist beer, a Belgian take on an American favourite and the almighty geuze!
Trappist Beer - Chimay Grande Réserve (Blue)
There are only 10 Trappist breweries in the world, mostly based in Belgium and the Netherlands. Trappist breweries are always associated with a Trappist monastery and there are very strict rules that breweries must adhere to in order to be classified as such. One of the most important is that it must be a not for profit venture. Any money made from beer sales must either go back into the abbey to pay for upkeep and living costs of the monks, or donated to charity. Recently, some Belgian monks have travelled to America to help set up a true Trappist brewery over the waters in Massachusetts.
Chimay is a Belgian based Trappist brewery which brews four different beers. The blue is the darkest in colour and my favourite. It has the classic Belgian raisin/date/fruity taste combined with malt which produces the sweetness you get from a lot of Belgian beers, but it's balanced perfectly with floral notes too which I think offsets from the overly sweet taste some Belgian beers can have. In true Belgian style, this has a stonking ABV of 9% and you can really taste the alcohol which adds to the complexity and helps to balance out the sweetness even more.
Belgian Dark IPA - Troubadour Westkust
Westkust is Troubadour's homage to the very popular American west coast IPAs. They use hops from the Belgian West Coast (it may only be 65km but it's still a coastline!) to produce a very dark IPA. It has an IBU of 50 so isn't overly bitter but it has a more floral smell and taste than you'd expect from a Belgian beer. This blends with very roasted, malty coffee flavours and the traditional sweetness to produce a very interesting take on the usual dark IPAs, which I personally think can sometimes have almost too many competing flavours.
Geuze - Mort Subite
Geuze is a sour beer and isn't for the faint hearted! They are one of the hardest types of beer to brew because instead of controlled yeast, it's made using natural yeast from the air. Different brews are then blended together to produce the classic geuze taste, which is quite a shock the first time you try it! If you had a blind tasting, you probably wouldn't even be able to tell it was beer. It has a very sour, acidic taste that's more similar to cider. I actually really love geuze beers, but if you're trying one for the first time, remember to be open-minded!
Mort Subite is a fantastic geuze, especially if you don't normally think of yourself as a geuze fan because it isn't too overpoweringly sour. It's sweeter than most other geuzes and there's less of the 'wet hay' smell you can often get and instead it tastes really quite fruity but with the sharp tartness still kicking through. I asked Bruno Reinders, the master brewer, how he ensured each final product tasted the same since the blending process and natural yeast must make it difficult. He said that it was years of tasting that made sure he could correctly identify at what point the new batches tasted the same as the previous ones.
Which Belgian beers are your favourites?
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